Beowulf
Manuscript

In the British Library there is a manuscript, its edges scorched
and brittle, of Beowulf, one of the very earliest poems
in English and its first great literary masterpiece. It exists
only in this one vellum codex and has survived for a thousand
years, telling of an even earlier time, when the heroic age still
was remembered by a Christian audience.

The origin of the manuscript is completely unknown, but it
may have belonged to one of the monasteries dissolved by Henry
VIII. It first is mentioned in 1563 (the owner, who was gathering
manuscripts for a proposed dictionary, signed his name on the
first page) and eventually came into the possession of the antiquarian
Sir Robert Cotton. His library, which was augmented by his son
and grandson after his death in 1631, was the richest collection
of Anglo-Saxon literary and historical documents in existence.
The manuscripts were bound in leather and placed in fourteen
bookcases, each watched over by the bust of one of the twelve
Caesars, with those of Cleopatra and Faustina presiding over
the remaining two. The manuscript of Beowulf was known by the
designation Vitellius A. xv: the fifteenth volume on the first
shelf under the bust of Vitellius.

In 1700, the Cottonian library was willed to the British nation
and eventually moved to Ashburnham House at Westminster, which
was thought to be a safer location. But, two years later, on
October 23, 1731, there was a fire. The trustees broke into the
burning building and carried away, or threw from the windows,
hundreds of threatened volumes. Of the 958 manuscripts in the
library, several hundred were severely damaged either by fire
or water and thirteen completely destroyed, including a unique
copy of The Battle of Maldon and Asser's Life of Alfred.
Tightly bound between its leather covers, the Beowulf
manuscript survived but was burnt along its exposed edges. (Interestingly,
it was not cataloged at the time as being damaged.)

The collection was moved to the British Museum in 1753, when
it was founded. But the manuscript remained in its original binding,
and nothing was done to stop the dry, brittle pages from disintegrating.
Over time, the margins and even some of the text, itself, gradually
crumbled away, to be lost forever.

In 1786, some fifty years after the disastrous fire, G. J.
Thorkelin, an Icelandic scholar, came to the Museum, looking
for documents relating to Denmark, where the first part of Beowulf
takes place. He made two complete copies of the manuscript, the
first time this had been done, one by a professional copyist
and the other, himself, and returned to Copenhagen to study them.

But then calamity. Denmark was occupied during the Napoleonic
Wars and, in 1807, the English bombarded Copenhagen. Thorkelin's
house burned and his manuscript for an edition of Beowulf,
which just had been completed, was destroyed. The two transcripts
were saved, however, and Thorkelin began his work over again,
publishing the first printed edition of Beowulf in 1815.

The first English edition of Beowulf appeared in 1833, and,
in its preparation, the manuscript was re-examined. It was discovered
that the neglected volume had deteriorated even more and that
many of the words Thorkelin had been able to decipher after the fire now were
lost. Finally, in 1845, the British Museum took steps to preserve what
remained. Each leaf was mounted on a paper frame and the manuscript rebound.
Although this preserved the fragile edges, the paper and tape obscured some of
the letters. Beginning in 1993, the manuscript has been re-examined and
digitized as part of the Electronic Beowulf project.

Almost two thousand letters have disappeared along the brittle
edges. Were it not for Thorkelin's transcripts, which are in
the Royal Library of Denmark, many of these lost words and letters
could not have been restored. There are only three other major
manuscript collections of Old English poetry that survive. One
can imagine the thousands of pages that did not: the heroic epics,
the chronicles, the religious and devotional works, the songs
and tales of the Anglo-Saxon scop.

All lost.

Reference: "'Their Present Miserable State of
Cremation': the Restoration of the Cotton Library" by Andrew
Prescott, in Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an
Early Stuart Courtier and His Legacy (1997) edited by C.
J. Wright.